1. Field
The subject matter disclosed herein relates to debugging a currently executing operating system.
2. Description of the Related Art
A computer system crash occurs when an application, of part of an operating system, exits abnormally. The operating system may crash, for example, if a hardware exception occurs that cannot be handled, or when internal sanity checking logic detects that the operating system has lost internal self-consistency. A computer system may also hang; that is, the computer system may cease to respond to inputs. Debuggers are tools that can be used to diagnose and examine the causes of a crash or a hang.
If a computer system crashes, or is hung, only one user can open a debugging session using the debugger associated with the computer system and debug the currently executing operating system. If multiple users wish to debug the computer system, a user may need to trigger a system dump (also referred to as a kernel dump) which can then be analyzed by multiple simultaneously users. However, it is often desirable to allow multiple users to open multiple debugging sessions on the currently executing computer system that has crashed or that is hung.